MONROE — The assembly operation is well-planned here.
In a garage next to a large parked RV, volunteers go from station-to-station assembling bags full of food — specifically, baking ingredients — that allow struggling area families to bake their own holiday cheer, without the trips to the store for ingredients that keep going up in price.
The effort, known as Baker’s Dozen and helmed by Rich Maliszewski of Monroe, is in its third year and keeps expanding: This year, more than 400 families will get one of the bags. In 2022, there were about 300 of them.
Inside, recipients will find all the ingredients they need to prepare holiday baked goods, including a quality baking sheet donated by Nodic Wear, a cookbook donated by WE Energies and a set of measuring cups provided to the effort by Colony Brands.
As the volunteers gathered for the assembly process, Maliszewski talked about how about the program, has grown. The kits that come from his heart and garage are distributed to needy families mainly through food pantries in eight communities around Green County. Most of the volunteers to the effort come from Monroe Kiwanis and Optimist Club chapters.
“If this keeps growing, I’m going to need a successor,” Maliszewski said, jumping down from one of the trailers he’s acquired to haul groceries from the several area stores where he spent weeks planning and buying hundreds of pounds of butter, sugar, salt spices, flour and other necessities. “It’s really a sweet problem for us to have.”
Maliszewski negotiates all over the place for his products — this year’s eggs come from an Illinois farm, for example, while the sticks of real butter are from Grassland Dairy of Wisconsin. Over at the end of the assembly line, volunteer Andy Hendrickson, is stacking the finished bags in neat rows along the garage’s ample floor.
“I just retired, so this is a nice thing to do,” said Hendrickson.
In charge of the large containers of salt is Sephanie Ruffi, an Aster employee also in her first-year volunteering with the Baker’s Dozen project.
“The number of things here is just amazing,” she said. “I’m glad to be a part of it.”
An hour into the project, the group had over 100 bags packed and figured to spend the rest of Thursday afternoon finishing up. Then, he said, volunteers would spend the next week or so delivering the kits to the area pantries and communities.
Most of the time, he said, the people who regularly use the pantries do not know they are getting these extras ahead of time, so it makes for a nice surprise to folks who could use a break, anyway. All told, there are about 5,200 separate components to the bags, which weigh about 20 pounds each.
“We want them (pantry clients) to have something they knew came from people who did this for them and not just the regular pantry stuff,” he said, noting that bags are going to the towns of Brodhead and Albany for the first time this year — anywhere the need is great.
Maliszewski said he isn’t sure what’s ahead for the program, other than that it just keeps growing in the number of volunteers, in its reach to new areas; and to the number of people served.
“It’s just something I wanted to do for people,” Maliszewski said. “I’m just glad it has worked out so well.”
